1.1.8-Kingedmundsroyalmurder
Brick!club day 8: of athiesm, amorality, and caricatures So yeah, sorry again for not getting to this yesterday (and also for not doing it this morning like I said I would. I kind of didn’t get up until noon…) I also haven’t gone through the tag thoroughly yet (saving that for after I’ve done up this post and then next one) so sorry if I end up repeating what others have already said. Okay, so I am more charitable towards this chapter than some of you I think. I remember quite enjoying it the first time through and looking through it again I still find it interesting. I also find the senator’s arguments a bit more substantial than some or at least decently true to stuff I’ve heard or read argued by actual real people. So first off we get a narrative portrait of the senator, which is actually startlingly nuanced given what follow. He is self-centered when it comes to his career, thinking nothing of stepping on other people to get to where he wants to be, but he’s also a good friend and a good father and a good son. He does favors for and lends money to those he likes and he enjoys life. Sure, he’s fairly selfish, but we don’t all get to be Monseigneur L’Eveque. He strikes me as a relatively decent human being with maybe a slightly higher sense of his own intelligence than is strictly accurate. But Hugo ignores those better bits and focuses directly in on his somewhat convoluted philosophy, which seems to be some version of “take the good bits from all these different schools of thought and call it enlightened.” And yeah, I’ve met people who do that, and yes they annoy me, but that doesn’t make him evil, just a bit pretentious and thoughtless. Again, not really terrible crimes. (Though it does seem a bit unwise to make fun of the Bishop directly to his face.) The first thing I picked up on in his extended monologue is that, yes, the senator does not believe in charity and yes, that does what it’s meant to and makes me give him some serious side-eyeing. (He also seems to consider humanity the pinnacle of creation, which also makes me side-eye him, but that’s more due to my own personal issues than anything Hugo did to make him unlikeable. I’ve no idea what the common thinking was at the time Hugo was writing but it would surprise me if it didn’t have rather a lot of human supremacy going on.) But he also makes a good point, which I think others have picked up on: when he asks why he should be good to other people the answer he gets is “because God says so.” That is not, in my opinion, an appropriate reason. Not that it’s necessarily a bad reason, but if your only reason for being a good person is because you’re scared of the consequences of doing otherwise I think that’s kind of cheating. Aren’t you supposed to be good and kind and charitable because it’s the right thing to do rather than because God will punish you if you’re not? Otherwise you’re being selfish in your charity, which seems like the wrong way to do it. (Again, this is where I add the disclaimer that I was raised secular and my thoughts on religion come from the culture I’ve absorbed and extended conversations with my (protestant) fiance on the subject, so intent could very well be immaterial after all.) Also! The senator is basically a prototypical social Darwinist, though Les Mis came out just before Origin of Species so I’m assuming that Hugo didn’t frame it in those terms. But that’s totally what he is (with a really random bit of Marx thrown in there, but we’ll get to that). See: “Il faut être mangeant ou mangé. Je mange. Mieux vaut être la dent que l’herbe. Telle est ma sagesse.” (One must eat or be eaten. I eat. Better to be the tooth than the grass. That is my wisdom.) He’s basically espousing the capitalist ideal via the circle of life: I will use my resources to get to the top and if any are crushed underfoot that is not my problem. It’s a fundamentally selfish ideology, and it contrasts with the Bishop’s later socialism in everything but name. I don’t particularly like capitalism, because I don’t really approve of trampling people underfoot, but it’s an ideology that has withstood the test of time fairly well. The senator’s argument is one that I can actually see real people making, albeit not people that I would necessarily enjoy hanging out with. And then we get to his little bit on the nature of religion and God and it’s basically Marx. His point is that God is a story told to and by the poor to serve as comfort (and he implies that they’re too stupid to realize the lie, which is not Marx, just upper class privilege). Marx’ thing about religion is that it’s a tool used by the bourgeoisie to control the proletariat (hence the phrase “opiate of the masses,” which is a cultural meme in certain circles) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_of_the_people. I have no clue if Hugo did that on purpose or not. The link leads to the opium of the people wiki page, which has the relevant excerpt and tells me that the essay was published before Les Mis, so Hugo could have been familiar with it. One could certainly pull a Marxist reading out of the book as a whole if one wanted to, but Marx wasn’t the only one to have those kinds of ideals, just the one who wrote them down in an easily digestible format complete with rallying cry. The Bishop’s rebuttal is basically a condemnation of the senator’s form of capitalism. Those at the top, he says, get to enjoy their materialism and their social superiority without fear because they’re secure in their position. And their philosophies are tailored to them alone and suit their needs perfectly. How gracious of them, then, to allow the poor their religion and their beliefs. (“Mais vous êtes bons princes, et vous ne trouvez pas mauvais que la croyance au bon Dieu soit la philosophie du peuple, à peu près comme l’oie aux marrons est la dinde aux truffes du pauvre.” (But you are good princes and you do not find it wrong that belief in the good Lord should be the philosophy of the poor, kind of like goose with chestnuts is the turkey with truffles of the poor.)) Commentary Viventlespeuples Social Darwinism predates Darwinism itself actually. Folks like Herbert Spencer had been theorizing and publishing on the subject for years before Darwin published, after which they incorporated natural selection and Darwin’s name got tacked onto it. They’d gotten along just fine before that with Lamarckian ideas of evolution. The mechanism for change itself didn’t much matter. Kingedmundsroyalmurder (reply to Viventlespeuples) Ah, okay. Thanks for the correction. Clearly I need to do better research before posting these. ~grins~